There's No Nation Like Donation

Universities will often go to alumni looking for donations, which has become a little awkward. I'm sure it made sense in my parents' generation, when tuition was low and education was undertaken in a spirit of enlightenment.

But today's grads look at it differently. Obviously, many are held back by the fact that they're asked for a donation while still paying down student debt. But even if debt isn’t holding them back, university plays a different part in our lives now.

Today, it's more of a business proposition.  The university may not be making a profit on education, but it is charging as much as it can while still remaining a sensible value proposition, much a products on the free market are. Tuition is an investment, that — while expensive — will pay off in the long term. Once you’ve paid a huge amount of money as an expensive long term business investment, You’re less likely to think of that institution as a charity.

It would be like if you bought a car, and it's a really nice car, and you're glad you bought it. But then a year later the car company phones you to ask if you'd care to give them more money. It's like, yes, I like the car, but I paid fair market value for it, so I assumed that was the end of the transaction. It’s not something I think about donating to.

There's lots of things that ask for donations today. I mean, Wikipedia is one biggest ones. It's such an unusual institution to begin with: a widely-used resource that doesn't make a profit or get government grants. So I don’t have any automatic assumptions about giving to it.

In sharp contrast to the University situation, Wikipedia is an institution that you've never given money to through payment for services or through taxes. So its donation requests are unusual: usually charitable giving is purely altruistic, given to a service that others — less-fortunate people — will use. It's not too often that you’re asked to donate for your own sake. The closest parallel is a busker, but you generally don’t choose your buskers. Okay, maybe a better parallel would be a museum with a “recommended donation,” which is kind of what the Wikipedia donation request/guilt-trip is.

(To be clear, I’m not comparing Wikipedia to a University education. I’m aware that the latter is necessarily a lot more expensive than the former)

And now, at this time of the rolling year, many institutions are asking for donations. Not just charities, but also open-source software, and public radio & TV. It’s a reminder of how our world has developed a lot of “free” options that nevertheless need to pay the bills, and non-mainstream media tastes will make it more likely you’ll encounter them. It makes me wonder if this is going to be a viable way of keeping things operating in the future: A labour of love that stays afloat with donations. It’s an odd idea, because we think of donations as going to the less fortunate, in a situation where users of the service are in no position to contribute. But now we’re talking about users paying for their own service, but voluntarily, and hoping that the donations from the wealthy or extra-generous will offset those who can’t or won’t contribute. 

Will it work in the long term? I’m skeptical, though some open-source software has been sustained for a while now with a combination of volunteering and semi-self-interested donations from people and corporations. So maybe it can work.

I’ve Got The Brains, You’ve Got The Looks

I'm really getting sick of investment commercials. I know, you have to expect this sort of thing at tax time, but now it seems like they're going year round.

I especially hate those Questrade ads where they have highly assertive customers talking back to their brokers. The intended result is that were supposed to feel empowered to rebel against our brokers. But for me, the feeling I get is sympathy for the brokers. Poor guys, having to defend themselves against people who are surprised to find that mutual funds have fees. The fact that they don't lose their temper shows some remarkable restraint. I think i'll invest with them. Where do they sell Strawman Funds?

The Wealth Simple ads have a bunch of people in the target demographic talking about investing. At first, it was kind of refreshing: they talked about money in a relatable, down-to-earth way. They managed to sound like overwhelmed consumers, without sounding like the unrealistically dense idiots normalizing stupidity on most commercials.

But as the campaign has gone on, they’re increasingly being smartass know-it-alls. It wouldn’t be so bad if they were showing people learning about investing and thus getting more confident, but instead they just seem to be getting more arrogant but still clueless.

I mean there’s that one where the woman talks about how you don’t want to invest in big institutions, because everyone knows that large organizations are crumbling dinosaurs going nowhere, really, just trust us, the upstart investment company. Then she says you want to invest in the “disrupters,” a word she surely learned from an online TED Talk. Has she ever thought about how many startups go nowhere? I know millennials hate being characterized as inexperienced and unworldly, but they’re old enough to remember the dot com crash.

And now there’s a new ad, where they tell you how your money can make more money, and that money can make more money, etc. It leaves me depressed that they feel the need to explain compound interest to people. I guess it’s good that they’re trying to clean up after our education system. But mainly I’m suspicious of it. Why are they specifically targeting the least knowledgeable segment of the audience?

Past The Tipping Point

Earls - a restaurant chain in western Canada - is experimenting with mandatory tipping. That is, the tip (16%) is just added to your bill automatically.

This seems like a weird half-way point. If you're going to get rid of tipping, why not just drop the concept altogether, pay a living wage, and wrap that in the prices? In other words, make it just like most goods and services. It's kind of odd how we have a selection of services for which we tip, and most that we don't. Generally we tip for services where we are in close proximity to the server (serving, hair styling, taxi drivers.) I guess it's important that we reward good service in such areas, though there are plenty of times we rely heavily on someone we don't work directly with, and thus don't tip (chefs, car mechanics, bus drivers.) And then there's the fact that some restaurants pool the tips and distribute among all staff, so any message you send with your tip will be lost on your server.

Because of that arbitrary distinction, I was surprised that most media folks discussing the manditory tip seemed incredulous that there was no incentive for servers to do a good job. Sure, you could say that tips provide a little more incentive, but everyday we rely on countless people who have no incentive to do a good job, other than a desire to keep their job. And of course, these media folk themselves fall into that category too.

So I'd just as soon get rid of tips altogether and pay proportionatly higher prices, assuming that the employees end up with the same amount of money under the new system. If you must send a message about your appreciation or disapproval, you'd have to do it by, you know, talking to the server.

Requiem For A McDonald's

Our local McDonald's is closing. Of course, this being downtown Kitchener, it's not a conventional McDonald's; it's in Market Square. That's an urban mall that has its own depressing story, but suffice to say it's yet another Canadian downtown mall that hasn't done well in recent decades. It's largely empty, even though most of it has been repurposed for other uses.

But thanks to office workers' lunch needs, the second floor food court has hung on to life, much longer than it has any right to. There are local food vendors that have come and gone, a Tim Hortons that was replaced by a Subway, and a Chinese place that I don't think anyone has noticed isn't Manchu Wok. But the McDonald's has been consistently popular.

As I say, it's not an ordinary McDonald's. For one thing, the mall's attempt to reinvent itself has meant that this is one of the few fast food places directly outside a health club.  (I've always wondered which of them benefits from that arrangement.) And being a mere counter, it doesn't even carry the full menu. Really, I think the whole place would fit in the ball pit at a suburban McDonald's Play Place.

But it's also unusual in its clientele. In an urban setting, the average wealth of the customers is probably a lot lower than your average. I've noticed that orders tend to be pretty small, many go for the free refills, and people pick and choose from the menu looking to stretch their cash. That gets pushed in your face when you're waiting for your order, and realizing customers have become experts in maximizing value.

Manager: I have three double cheeseburgers and an apple pie! Here you go sir. Who else is still waiting for their order? You sir, what are you waiting for?
Me: A Big Mac combo
Manager, to kitchen: Do we have a Big Mac meal for Mr. Big Spender here?

I guess that's a big part of why it's closing. Supposedly fast food places make their money in certain very specific items, like drinks, so I can image this place doesn't make much money. But I do worry about the many people who have been regulars. I know, as a lefty I'm supposed to blame McDonald's for exploiting the poor, but I don't see many locally-owned fair-trade artisan restaurants selling anything you could call a meal for just pocket change.

You Got A Fast Car

Recently, a car put up for auction got some notice. It's a Ferrari Enzo, and the latest price is $370,000. That's quite a steal for an expensive, rare car that's no longer being made.

Of course, there's a catch: it's been in an accident, and needs some work. By "some work," I mean one wheel is missing, both the front and rear suspension are badly damaged. The engine starts, but many parts need replacing. Many body panels are damaged, and since they're made out of composite materials they'll likely need replacing. And worst of all, the carbon fibre "tub" that makes up the the core of the car has cracked, and that will cost a lot to fix. The total repair bill is estimated at $870,000.

So why would anyone pay $300,000+ for a that will need close to a million in repairs? Because that's actually a good price compared to the cost of a mint-condition model.

It brings up an interesting aspect of limited-edition supercars like the Enzo or the McLaren F1: they're nearly impossible to destroy. That's not because they're any more durable than your average car: you can easily find schadenfreude reports of them getting badly damaged when someone tries driving them at their limits. But they are difficult to write-off.

We use the terms "write-off" or "totalled" as a generic way of saying "destroyed," but what it technically means is that something is too expensive to repair. For instance, say your 1997 Taurus sustains damage that will cost $4,000 to fix. But a replacement car of similar vintage would likely cost less than a thousand. Thus, it doesn't make sense for you (or your insurance company) to pay for the repair; it would be cheaper to buy a replacement car.

But these famous-but-rare supercars are so expensive, it's nearly impossible to damage them so badly that repairs will be too expensive to undertake.  Just about any repair will cost less than the fixed car will be worth.

With that in mind, I've decided that I will put my Ferrari Enzo up for auction. Like the one in this story, it needs some work. You will have to replace the body, suspension, wheels, engine, transmission, interior and chassis. See, my Ferrari Enzo is, technically, a twisted piece of metal I found in the street the other day. But I'm sure you could rebuild it for less than the current asking price for an Enzo. Jay Leno, I await your call.

Mr. Roe, Throw Out This Wallet!

Well, I'm finally getting rid of my wallet. I've had other wallets that I've used for the proliferation of cards we've had over the years, but for the last twenty years, this has been my main wallet.

And here's what's so remarkable about it.

Yes, it says, "Made in German D. R." And if you know your twentieth-century geopolitics, you'll know that is the German Democratic Republic. And you'll further recognize that as the official name of East Germany. Yes, my wallet was one of the few products made during the eleven months between the fall of communism and the German reunification. I'm sure there couldn't have been much produced in that time. Say, a few hundred wallets, some watered-down beer and three-and-a-half Trabants.

But I appreciate the work of those semi-socialist workers and leather from The People's cows. Aside from the historic curiosity, I've enjoyed the irony of getting my money out of a communist wallet.

Hey, Bale

The big new in the sporting world (and for once I do mean "world") is that Real Madrid is buying Gareth Bale from Tottenham Hotspur for €100 million. (Translation for North Americans who didn't understand a word of that: big Spanish soccer team pays $130 million to get up-and-coming star from biggish English team.  And I just learned Android phones do have a Euro key.)

And this is a regular occurrence.  As soon as a great player emerges , they'll be off to a bigger team.  My family's own Aston Villa has a budding star in Christian Benteke, and its already a foregone conclusion. That he'll be gone by next year.  It's like what happens in baseball but even faster.  Fans of the poorer baseball teams worry that they only get star players for four years before the Yankees snatch them up?  That's nothing: in European soccer your lucky to get one year.

So each country's league has only a few real teams that win each year.  Some have suggested that it would be better if these top few teams in each country left their domestic leagues and joined one pan-European league.  But even that wouldn't work, since the two Spanish leaders, Real Madrid and Barcelona have emerged as the dominant teams of the continent.  Even other massive teams like Manchester United are really just working with star players that couldn't quite make the Spanish giants.  I'm not sure why Spain emerged as the ultimate hirer of European talent .  They don't seem to be any more soccer-mad than, say, Italy or England.  And they definitely aren't awash in money.  Maybe it's just because their two teams are based around two dominant cities, representing two cultures.  That would concentrate fan loyalties - and thus, fan wallets - unlike more arbitrary rivalries.

Every time a player transfers from a feeder team to a big team, I think maybe this is the point that they're finally going to realize how stupid their system is.  But it appears that nothing will provoke a change, and we'll one day see the top twenty-two players on Earth facing off in a single game, arbitrarily representing the two largest cities in Spain.

Playing FTSE

You may have heard the old joke of the guy who named his dog, "Sex."  It was printed by Ann Landers years ago, and has now been around the Internet a few times too.  There are different versions, with excuses for light double-entendres: "Sex keeps me up at night," "I only had Sex before I got married," etc.

I was reminded of this joke recently, when I found out that the Moscow stock exchange is the Moscow Interbank Currency Exchange, which is abbreviated, "Micex" and pronounced "mice-X," or if you prefer, "my sex."  So now there's an excuse for a whole new generation of jokes: My sex is improving, lots of people are interested in my sex, my sex brings in a lot of money.

Be A Hated Cyclist Without Drugs

Let's say you're a waffle enthusiast.  You might be inclined to skip over the normal waffle irons that everyone else buys and get that super advanced top-of-the-line model, even though it costs a thousand dollars. 

So why else - other that extreme waffle love - might you buy a thousand dollar waffle iron?  Well, you might be a really rich person who thinks nothing of spending  thousands on appliances, so if you're going to get a waffle iron, you might as well get the best.  Or you might just be a competitive jerk who needs to beat your neighbours at everything.

I never realized any of this because my interests don't really fit this pattern.  Better music doesn't cost any more than regular music.  Better technology does cost more, but if you want something high-tech and expensive, you can always just wait a month.  And then there's cars.  You can certainly spend more to get a better car.  But even an ordinary car stretches an average person's finances to the edge, so paying many-times more for a slightly better model is not an option.  Thus, if you see someone driving an expensive car, you know they fit into the "rich" category.  On the one hand that's unfortunate: there are lots of people out there driving great cars they don't appreciate, and lots of people who would love to drive a great car but never will.  But on the other hand, at least those show-off jerks don't get a chance to show-off their cars.

I'm thinking about this after reading a bicycle review in Wired.  "Wired does bike reviews?" you ask.  Yes.   It gives them a chance to indulge their urban hippy San Francisco spirit without directly offending the libertarian sensibilities of their readership.  Unfortunately, bikes are quite unlike cars in that they are a prime example of the cost extremes.  You can afford an extremely expensive bike if you're in the enthusiast or show-off categories.  But unlike the waffle iron, the high end bike is a very public purchase.  And while it won't bankrupt most people, it does reach into the are-you-insane territory.

But the main problem is that a person can not only buy a good bike, they can get into the diminishing returns territory.  This is a concept I do understand from cars.  You can buy a nice luxury/sports car for double the price of a normal car.  You can even up the price to the $100,000-200,000 range to get an even better car.  But beyond that it starts to get silly.  As I pointed out in an earlier article, you can spend into the millions on a car, but at that point you'll only be getting a slightly better car.  Of course with cars, by the time your wealth has gotten to the point where you spend an extra million dollars to take another half-second off your zero-to-sixty time, you've probably left normality behind long ago.  But a person of average wealth might just consider paying the extra five-thousand dollars to scrape an extra half-pound of weight off the frame.  Somehow that's crazier than the million-dollar car, since: 1) you could buy useful stuff with that extra five grand, and 2) you could achieve the same result simply by skipping the fries in favour of a salad.

Cheque? Please!

It's about this time of the year that someone asks, "Be honest, what year are you writing on cheques?"  I always want to respond, "1998 ... since that was the last time I wrote a cheque.  It's called the Internet, look into it."

But seriously, I do have to write cheques sometimes, and when I do, I never get the year wrong.   See, the last time I needed to order new cheques, it was just before the turn of the millennium, and the bank was apparently trying to get rid of the cheques with the year marked as "19__".  So even though I ordered a book of 50, they sent me a box of 500.  That was around the same time that electronic banking and direct withdrawals meant that I started using the chequebook only once or twice a year.  So I will never order new cheques again.  And I already know that when I go into the old-folks home, and I write the cheque to pay for it, I'll have to cross out "19" before writing "2063."

That's Great It Starts With An Earthquake

Like most people, tonight I'm busy building a shrine to the Mayan god Q'uq'umatz.  So here's an end-of-the-world essay I published on Facebook three years ago:

I'm a pessimist, so I'm not really shocked by all the problems of the world. And yet there's something not-quite-right about what's going on now. I finally decided that it's not that the world's going down the toilet that's worrying me, it's just that I didn't think it would play out anything like this.

Swine Flu

Disease is really not how I pictured civilization ending. A disease generated amongst livestock as part of intensive farming techniques? That's just not homo sapiens style. Nuclear war, ill-advised genetic manipulation, maybe even pissing off a powerful alien species — that's the sort of thing I was expecting. Placing the products of wisdom in the hands of the foolish or emotional: that's the humanity I know. But dying of disease was more fitting for the Martians in War of the Worlds — not us. On the other hand, we're about to face millions of deaths and we're more concerned that calling it "swine flu" will hurt pig farmers; that is an appropriately silly touch.

But it still doesn't seem right. As a committed cynic, I always pictured that — however we manage to screw ourselves — I'd be able to bitterly turn to the person next to me and say, "told you so." As it stands, a Muslim or Jew will say that to me.

Pigs: okay, maybe they deserve it. Did you know that after primates, marine mammals, and elephants, pigs are the next most intelligent animals? So the fact that we eat them in such numbers violates even our usual flimsy division between pets and food. And sure, we forced them to live unnaturally in their own filth, then made them the paragon of uncleanliness because they live in their own filth, so there's plenty of poetic justice here. But I still would have bet on killer bees or tsetse flies.

The Environment

As a child looking into the future, it always seemed like the only way we'd avoid environmental disaster would be to gain a new awareness of our place in the world and our responsibility for the ecosystem and our effect on it. That awareness seems to be an all-or-nothing proposition: you either notice and do something, or ignore it and go on as you always have. So I figured we would either achieve a hippyish love of the earth, or run the planet into the ground. As it happens though, we've found ourselves in a kind of in-between-state of awareness of the problem and paralysis of action.

What kind of a state is that? We're a race that's usually caught in either desperate action or defiant ignorance. Easter Island is often held up as a microcosm of our environmental predicament: they died out after destroying all the forests on the island. They didn't just destroy some of the forest, stop and say, "oops," then fade away in a slow decay. No, they died like humans are supposed to — stubbornly cutting down every last tree. But look at what we're doing now: we kind of realize we have to change, but we're hemming and hawing trying to come up with a plan to change. It's so...Canadian!

2012

If you haven't yet heard, the story here is that the Mayans had a calendar that that ends in 2012, which has led everyone with a new-age bone in their body to be convinced that the world will end in 2012. Specifically, a few days before Christmas — man those Mayans were jerks; I'm glad they disappeared. That of course brings up the next obvious point: the Mayans don't generally have a good record when it comes to seeing disaster coming.

Is this the best we can do for an omen of doom? No explanation of why the world would end. No cryptic description of how it will happen, no signs we can argue over. Just a date. There's nothing to this end-of-the-world prediction except the end itself. It's the Final Destination of apocalypses.

Back in university, I tried to convince people that the world would end on September 29, 1997, but at least I had misinterpreted bible verses to back it up. Even Y2K had a story behind it, albeit a silly and poorly understood one. This is just the Mayan calendar stopping without explanation.

Now the fact is that I'm something of an expert on the Mayan Long Count Calendar. Of course, I'm using the modern definition of “expert,” meaning that I didn't only read the Wikipedia entry, I read a couple of other web pages too. It turns out that the Mayan calendar doesn't really end in 2012 — that's just the date when this creation exceeds the age of previous, imperfect creations. Even the Mayans themselves didn't believe that would mean the end of the world. That's a pretty flimsy justification even for a Hollywood blockbuster, never mind for people actually getting worried.

Truth and Reason

I don't want to get too wrapped up in the American health care debate. Let's just agree that there are a lot of good arguments for each side. But, well, that's kind of the problem: no one is actually using those arguments, they're just yelling at each other. As if that's not enough, most of what they're yelling isn't even true. Again, this isn't how I imagined it.

I guess 1984 and Brave New World ushered us towards a view of a future that was dystopian, but was at least an organized dystopia. The citizenry would be held in check by a system of lies, but at least they were well-written lies told by professionals. I never expected that disinformation would be coming in the form of a chain e-mail from Aunt Jean who hasn't read a newspaper in thirty years. At least it fits the human pattern: smart people develop something (here, the Internet) then it gets mishandled by everyone else.

Add to that another problem: for a while now, there's been an over-analysis of politicians' everyday decisions. Everything from the President's choice of beer to his jeans has been criticized. So it's now official, we're living in 1984 in reverse, with the Proles spying on and lying to Big Brother.

Finance

Whenever unusual things happen in the financial world, I like to try to understand it by going back to basic principles and looking at the big picture. Economics is really just a system for allocating resources. So I try putting aside the common terms and abstract ideas, and explaining it like I'm trying to explain it to someone from another planet. For instance, when the price of oil goes up, it's just the system telling us that more people are using a fixed resource, so we're going to have to try to be more frugal with it.

In the case of the housing collapse, it all comes down to the system mistakenly devoting far too much of our resources to building houses in the US. In a way, that's not surprising: as an apartment dweller, I've noticed that people always go a little crazy when they buy a house. Well apparently our whole society went a little bit crazy. The last thing I need is another reason to hate suburbia, but now I can see that it's not only destroyed our environment and our culture, but our economy too.

One of the strangest parts of the financial crisis is that it originated in the US, but they aren't even the hardest hit. Who has been hurt worse? Eastern Europe and India. It hardly seems fair that Americans go nuts trying to buy houses, and the people who suffer the most can't afford houses. I guess the British were hurt too, but if you've ever watched the British house-buying programs on HGTV, then you have to agree there's some kind of real estate karma there. But then there's Iceland; their economy was devastated and their currency devalued. They ended up so poor they couldn't even afford to keep their McDonald's outlets open. That's like being officially demoted out of the First World.

The one group that might benefit are the Chinese. Their economy hicupped when the Americans stopped buying, but now they're moving again, with the Americans recovered enough that they can afford the cheap crap the Chinese make, even if they're still too nervous to buy the expensive stuff Americans or the Japanese make. And now the Chinese — just when it seemed their world domination couldn't get any more inevitable — will end up as America's largest creditor.

And as an aside, let me say this: The Chinese make terrible global villains. No crazy ideology they insist on spreading, no vendetta against anyone, not even a wacky leader. Just people who want to be middle class, and a government that has no aspiration beyond staying in power. Again, so Canadian.

Perhaps more than anything, I hate how this financial crisis has turned everyone's ideologies around. Harper is running up a deficit, the Chinese government is actually acting socialist, the Americans are nationalizing companies. I don't even know who to root for anymore.

Fittingly, The Blue Jays' Fate Depends On Someone Saying, "OK"

This week, the Toronto Blue Jays agreed to a massive trade with the Miami Marlins, bringing in several star players for surprisingly little cost.  It has Jays fans like myself feeling a very strange sensation we haven't had in years - what was it called again? - ah yes: optimism.

But baseball commissioner Bud Selig has been taking his time approving the trade, which has people nervous.  Yes, it's probably just because it is a spectacularly large trade that will take a while to check for crossed T's and dotted I's.  But still, baseball trades are usually just rubber stamped by the league office, so some people - particularly Marlins fans - are thinking he might actually be thinking about rejecting it.

No pressure Mr. Selig, but we will hunt you down if you reject this trade.  Yes, it may seem like this trade was a one-sided money shift which detracts from the purity of the game.  And you might be surprised that I do have sympathy for the Marlins and their fans; their seemingly promising team is now back to rebuilding mode, with no hope of competitiveness for years.

But the purity-of-the-game/fair-to-the-fans ship sailed a long time ago.  Yes, you could cancel the trade because it's all about money.  But there have been hundreds of salary dumps, rent-a-player deals, and stratospheric free-agent signings over the years.  If you were going to stop it, there have been plenty of chances over the past couple of decades.

Even you Marlins fans have to agree.  Yes, it may seem like you just traded half your team for two prospects and a homophobic shortstop.  But the fact is your team did essentially buy two World Series titles.  You live by the dollar, you die by the dollar.

Baseball decided years ago on a laissez-faire set-up for its economics.  You may or may not like that - I don't; I'd rather have an over-centralized, enforced-equality, semi-socialist system like the NFL - but that is the way things have been for years, and it's not fair to change the game on us now, just when it's going our way.